The Snowman by Jo Nesbø, Don Bartlett

gravel road, and there sooner or later a car would pass.
    She no longer heard any footsteps. No twigs cracking, no crunching of snow. Perhaps she had escaped? With her body hunched over, she moved swiftly towards the gurgling sounds.
    The stream looked as though it was flowing over a white bed sheet through a depression in the forest floor.
    Sylvia trampled straight in. The water, which reached mid-ankle, soon penetrated her boots. It was so cold that it froze her leg muscles. Then she began to run again. In the same direction as the water flowed. She made loud splashes as she lifted her legs for long, ground-gaining strides. No tracks, she thought triumphantly. And her pulse slowed, even though she was running.
    That had to be a result of the hours she had spent on the treadmill at the fitness centre last year. She had lost six kilos and ventured to maintain that her body was in better shape than those of most thirty-five-year-olds. That was what he said anyway, Yngve, whom she had first met at the so-called inspiration seminar last year. Where she had been all too inspired. My God, if only she could turn back the clock. Back ten years. All the things she would have done differently! She wouldn’t have married Rolf. And she wouldn’t have had an abortion. Yes, of course, it was an impossible thought now that the twins had come into the world. But before they were born, before she had seen Emma and Olga, it would have been possible, and she wouldn’t have been in this prison that she had constructed around herself with such care.
    She swept away the branches overhanging the stream, and from the corner of her eye she saw something, an animal, react with a startled movement and disappear into the grey gloom of the forest.
    It went through her mind that she would have to be careful swinging her arms so that she didn’t hit her leg with the hatchet. Minutes had passed, but it felt like an eternity since she had been standing in the barn slaughtering chickens. She had cut off two heads and had been about to cut off a third when she heard the barn door creak behind her. Of course she had been alarmed; she was alone and hadn’t been aware of either footsteps or a car in the yard. The first thing she had noticed was the strange apparatus, a thin metal loop attached to a handle. It looked like the snares they used to catch foxes. And when the holder of this instrument began to talk, it slowly dawned on her that she was the prey, she was the one who was going to die.
    She had been told why.
    And she had listened to the sick but limpid logic as the blood slowed in her veins, as if it were already coagulating. Then she had been told how. In detail. And the loop had begun to glow, first red then white. That was when she had swung her arm in horror, felt the recently sharpened hatchet blade cut through the material under the raised arm, seen the jacket and sweater open as if she had unzipped them and seen the steel slice a red line through the bare skin. As the figure had staggered backwards and fallen on the floorboards slippery with chickens’ blood, she had raced to the door at the back of the barn. The one leading into the forest. Into the darkness.
    The numbness had spread over her knees, and her clothes were soaked up to her navel. But she knew she would soon be on the gravel road. And from there it was no more than a quarter of an hour’s run to the nearest farm. The stream turned. Her left foot kicked something protruding from the water. There was a crack, it felt like someone had grabbed her foot, and the next moment Sylvia Ottersen was falling headlong. She landed on her stomach, swallowed water tasting of earth and rotten leaves, then pushed herself into a kneeling position. Once she knew she was still alone, and the first panic had passed, she discovered that her foot was trapped. She groped with her hand under the water expecting to find entwined tree roots around her foot, but instead her fingers felt something smooth